If you’re building the ultimate gaming rig, you’ll want to know the answer to this question: What is the best gaming processor you can buy? Is it the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D or the Intel Core i7 14900K? We’re here to answer that question.
Both processors have their strengths and weaknesses, and both go about things in different ways. The 14900K goes for the brute force approach, offering clock speeds as high as 6.0GHz. Other things being equal, a higher clock speed means higher performance. The problem with the 14900K is that it runs hot and requires a lot of power when presented with a full load.
AMD’s flagship incorporates stacked V-Cache, offering 128MB of on-chip level 3 cache compared to the 14900K’s 32MB. That means more data can be stored ‘close to the metal’. In games that benefit from low latency and fewer relatively slow memory accesses, this approach is a good one. However, the 7950X3D only includes V-cache on one of its two dies, and its lower clock speeds in comparison with the standard 7950X can hamper it under non-gaming workloads.
While both AMD and
